Mad Cow Disease in USA?

I think I'll grill up some burgers tonight while I wait for a real news source to report that.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I think I'll grill up some burgers tonight while I wait for a real news source to report that.

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I think Bloomberg might have been the first to report it.

This makes the fourth one found in the US in the past ten years or so.

Save me a burger.

Torgo said:

Huh, so this would be the fourth confirmed case. So perhaps: I sounded the BSE terror klaxon a little early?

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Well, I don't know. It seems like we've had more trouble with raw vegetables in the past few years.

To which every eight-year-old replied, "Yeah! No more broccoli, mom!"

Confirmed. It was a dairy cow. The risk of it getting into food that humans will consume is pretty much nil.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/mad-cow-case-confirmed-california-190915437.html

This fourth case is probably a freak natural occurrence, not the kind cause by bad feed. That said, there is BSE in the US. The other three cases showed that.

Torgo said:

By the way, I'm having fun imagining what the BSE Terror Klaxon sounds like. Feel free to enjoy your own mental version of that.

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Like this?

To be fair, BSE is pretty terrifying. It's up there with hantavirus in terms of stuff I really, really don't want to catch.

Same here. Just the thought of it will put me off meat for awhile.

Mike Tyson has the same effect on me.

I've heard of several confirmed cases but until there's a bona fide (bovina fide?) outbreak, there really isn't much to be concerned about. They're pretty good at containing this sort of thing.

On the up side, if you get it, you won't remember for long!

BSE is a bit different to others things we contain. Bacteria can have a tolerance level. BSE is more like asbestos. Any is too much. We should be testing at full eradication level, and we aren't.

veinglory said:

BSE is a bit different to others things we contain. Bacteria can have a tolerance level. BSE is more like asbestos. Any is too much. We should be testing at full eradication level, and we aren't.

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Prion diseases are terrifying things. Kuru is a prion disease, similar to BSE/CJD, which manifests among cannibals - it's transmitted by infected tissue.

Sleep well.

At least it never made it into the food supply--that's the main thing. And I hope it never does make it into the food supply.

When I was stationed in England (late 70s), contaminated meat did make into the food supply. To this day, I can't donate blood because I was in England at the start of the American Red Cross' time whereby people can't donate blood because of the possibility of contaminating the blood supply. So beyond the individual horror of contracting the disease, the potential to seriously dwindle blood supply is scary.

If the news of BSE turning up in the U.S. (or, indeed, anywhere) doesn't scare the poop out of you, I'd recommend reading Richard Rhodes' Deadly Feasts and/or The Family That Couldn't Sleep by, erm, someone else.

There's also "Mad Cowboy" by the rancher who was on Oprah:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0684845164/?tag=absowrit-20

When former cattle rancher Howard Lyman appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1996 to share his insider view of the danger of Mad Cow Disease spreading to this country, his revelations about the beef industry prompted a group of Texas cattlemen to file a lawsuit charging Lyman and the talk show host with "food disparagement." That wasn't enough to silence Howard Lyman, and in this stirring account of his journey from meat-loving cowboy to vegetarian environmental activist, he tells the whole truth about the catastrophic consequences of an animal-based diet.

Lyman is well aware of what goes into our livestock -- high doses of pesticides, growth hormone, and the ground-up remains of other animals.
...

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Williebee said:

Same here. Just the thought of it will put me off meat for awhile.

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What else is there to eat? All the veggies are tainted with e-coli or salmonella. And with only 4 cases since they started testing, beef is still whats for dinner.

Yes, yes, be scared...meanwhile the price of poultry will double...good...good... *cackles maniacally*

BSE in the US is scary. The USDA tests less than 1% of the animals that go into the food supply (even though the test cost less than $5). Worse, when a US producer wanted to test 100% of his animals (to export to Japan) the USDA prevented him from doing it ( http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2004/2004-04-15-02.html ) on the basis that if he tested his animals, then people might loose faith in the other processors. Worse, if his animals from tightly controlled circumstanced came up positive, the entire US herd may actually have a certain percentage of positive animals that are undetected. That could kill exports.

Now, given that BSE is a prion disease that takes at least 2 years to become significantly evident, that fact that most positives in the US are in dairy is normal (they aren't slaughtered until later in life, so they show up at the plant symptomatic and requiring testing). What they don't mention is that the calves produced by that cow may have gone into the food supply, but didn't 'pop positive' because they weren't symptomatic (slaughtered at 18mo or less) and didn't fall into the 1% tested.

What I don't understand is how did this cow get access to BSE (a prions disease) of any kind if it wasn't through feed? Prions are thought to be nearly indestructable. Are they saying this cow picked them up on pasture? Or was she out wandering the bad part of town? In the past, they've accused a positive cow of having been shipped into the US from Canada in an already positive state. If this cow was born and raised in the US, then there is at least a form of BSE in the US that needs to be tracked down.

Fins Left said:

What I don't understand is how did this cow get access to BSE (a prions disease) of any kind if it wasn't through feed? Prions are thought to be nearly indestructable. Are they saying this cow picked them up on pasture? Or was she out wandering the bad part of town? In the past, they've accused a positive cow of having been shipped into the US from Canada in an already positive state. If this cow was born and raised in the US, then there is at least a form of BSE in the US that needs to be tracked down.

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I'm curious about this as well. Every case I've heard of has come from the animal ingesting other animal parts through their feed. I don't know how else she might have acquired it, unless she was near the dead body of another animal with the prions. (Typically the bodies are disposed of in a lye pit as that's one of the few ways to destroy prions).

I don't think there is any comparison whatsoever between bacterial disease and prion disease. No level of prion disease is acceptable. It is untreatable, incurable and a very slow, horrible, obscene way to die. We need to test more and eradicate, not tolerate.